


Bedside Manner

by TheBreakfastGenie



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Episode: s02e02 In the Shadow of Two Gunmen: Part 2, Gen, past relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 22:29:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBreakfastGenie/pseuds/TheBreakfastGenie
Summary: Three days after he wakes up in a hospital bed with a bullet wound in his chest, his ex-girlfriend comes to see him to tell him she's resigning, and maybe give them once last shot at closure. Mandy visits Josh in the hospital, post-In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.





	Bedside Manner

**Author's Note:**

> I always swore to myself I would never write a "what happened to Mandy" fic, but here we are. Writing Josh and Mandy together was a fun challenge for me, and as one of the few Madeline Hampton apologists I wanted to take a stab at making her more sympathetic while still being relatively faithful to the Mandy of the show. I know Mandy doesn't have many fans but I hope you're able to enjoy this fic regardless.

Technically, visiting hours were over, but Mandy Hampton had always been persuasive. It had served her well in politics, which had been her chosen field until about thirty six hours ago. It also might have had something to with the fact that there were still secret service agents all over the hospital, even though the President had been released earlier that day. 

She’d had to wait until the actual visiting hours ended in order to avoid running into any of the others, who she knew would be spending a lot of time here. She wasn’t able to face them. She wasn’t sure she could face the person she was visiting, either, but she had to see him once before she left. 

She walked into the room, greeted by a sight that was somehow both better and worse than she expected. She’d half-expected to see him dead, even though she knew he was alive. There weren’t any tubes in his face which meant he was breathing on his own, which she thought was kind of impressive considering his lung had been collapsed by a bullet two days ago, but then again she didn’t know anything about medicine. (Maybe her next career move would be PR for a hospital. She could pick up a few things.) 

There was still an IV in his arm, of course, and one of those buttons you could push to get more pain medication. The thought of him in pain, desperately reaching for a button to provide pharmaceutical relief made her stomach churn, but she told herself she would keep down her dinner this time. She’d thrown up enough in the last two days to fill the vomit quota for the rest of her life, if such a thing existed. 

He was pale. Of course he was pale. He’d lost how much blood? But hadn’t they given him any in the hospital? It seemed like hospital patients were always pale. Maybe it was just the fluorescent lighting. 

He was dozing, or at least, his eyes were closed, but as she stood there observing him they slowly fluttered open. 

“Hey,” he said. It was all he could manage. He sounded hoarse, but god, he still sounded like Josh Lyman. Thank god. 

“Hey yourself,” she answered softly. Too softly. He wasn’t accustomed to niceness from her. He was going to know something was up. “You look like crap,” she amended. 

“You shoulda been a doctor. You’ve got the bedside manner down pat.” 

His words slurred a little and there were odd pauses for breath, but the vocabulary sounded more like him. 

“You should have been a doctor. I'm sure your mother would be happier.” 

He made what looked like a smile. 

“I’d be laughing at your hilarious if mildly anti-semitic humor but, you know, it kinda hurts.” 

Now she smiled. 

“I meant because doctors don’t tend to get shot at,” she teased, but it was more gentle than their usual back-and-forth. They examined each other. 

“What’s going on at the White House?” he asked, breaking the silence. That was typical. Joshua Lyman, barely alive, asking about work. 

“I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been in,” she admitted. 

“They didn’t call you in to help out in the immediate aftermath?” he asked. 

“I couldn’t get back. Everything was shut down. I guess they decided it was easier to work without me than try to find a way to get me into DC. Leo told me to stay put until things calmed down.” 

She’d been at her mother’s house in Pennsylvania. She’d been meant to stay three days, she’d requested them off when Leo told her they didn’t necessarily need her in Rosslyn, unless she really wanted to go. He’d also told her she could stay the full three days, but she’d driven back when the highways opened. 

“And you thought we couldn’t live without you,” he joked. 

“I think you’ll do just fine without me,” she said, and her voice really didn’t sound as causal as she’d hoped it would. 

It took him a minute to process her words, something that wasn’t unusual, but typically Josh bulldozed right past her and the delay was caused by his mind working on three others things at the same time. This time it was a true delay, as his exhausted brain worked out the implications of what she’d said. He did it, but it took an un-Josh-like amount of time. 

“Mandy what are you saying?” he asked finally, in a voice that said he already knew the answer. 

“I’m resigning, Josh,” she told him, pulling the thin, white envelope out of her purse. “I’m going to the White House first thing in the morning and I’m giving this to the President.” 

“Mandy,” he began croakily, but she cut him off. At least there was still that normalcy to their relationship. 

“I can’t do it, Josh. Working for the President is an honor and I loved it, but I don’t have it in me to do this. People being shot at, people that I know…”

“Not just shot at,” he interrupted. “Some of us were actually shot.” 

“That’s what I’m saying,” she continued. “I’m not cut out to deal with this. I’ve been a nervous, vomiting wreck and I wasn’t even there. I wasn’t remotely prepared for this.” 

“You’re right,” he said, and his voice had changed, “you weren’t there.”

“Josh…” she began, not knowing what she was going to say next, but knowing it wouldn’t matter because there wasn’t even the slightest chance he was going to let her say it. 

“Shut up, Mandy! The President got shot. I got shot. Toby found me, did you know that? He wouldn’t even tell me. The President told me. Sam pulled CJ to ground, probably saved her life… do you see any of them quitting? Any of us?” 

“No,” Mandy whispered. 

“Then shut up with this ‘I can’t handle this’ crap. Of course you weren’t prepared for it. None of us were prepared for it. But we’re handling it. Because we have to.” 

“I’ve always been in and out of the game. A part of you’s always thought I don’t belong here,” she said, because it was easier to argue about that than it was to explain why she was quitting. 

“You were asked to serve the President. You don’t just walk away.” 

“If I want to I have that right,” she pointed out, which of course was the wrong thing to say. 

There was a heavy silence, the tension in the room so thick none of the gunmen’s bullets could have pierced it. She was about to break it, about to apologize. 

“You know what, Mandy?” he said suddenly. “You want out, get out.” 

“Josh…” she pleaded, but what she was pleading for she didn’t know. 

“Get out,” he repeated. 

She stared at him for a moment, turned on her heel, and left. 

***

It was nine o clock in the morning. Once again she knew she was safe, the people she was avoiding were preoccupied at this hour with running the country, an activity that generally required them to be at the White House and not George Washington University Hospital. 

She figured at least one of them would come at lunch, which was why she’d come so early. She didn’t expect this visit to take long, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. He might want to lecture her. (He’d really want to yell at her, but she doubted he was in any condition to yell at the moment.) 

She thought maybe if he was asleep she’d just turn around and go. She didn’t think she had the courage to wake him and if she waited for him to wake up on his own she’d lose her nerve. But he was awake. 

“Hi, Josh.” 

He regarded her for a moment. She recognized the look. He was trying to read her. He was good at that. 

“Hi, Mandy,” he said. He schooled his face into a neutral expression.  
He hadn’t been able to read her. It was probably the fog of the pain medication. She couldn’t entertain the thought that it was something else, something wrong with him. 

“How are you feeling?” 

“Like I got shot in the chest by a racist whack-job.” 

That was enough to make her half-smile. 

“Fair enough.” 

The silence that fell between them was awkward but she was used to it. Josh and Mandy had always fought a lot and this moment always came along sooner or later. She knew approximately how many seconds it would be until he wasn’t staring at her and then she could start staring at him. But when she looked at his face his eyes weren’t on her or the floor. They were closed. 

She waited (she wasn’t sure how long) and eventually his eyes opened. 

“How’d the President take it?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just practically fallen asleep in the middle of an awkward conversation. It was possible, she thought, that he didn’t even realize it had happened. 

For the second time in the last twenty four hours she reached into her purse and produced the white envelope. 

“You didn’t give it to him.” 

He sounded relieved and that bothered her. He’d never wanted her to work there in the first place. 

“I wanted to talk to you first. I didn’t feel right leaving when things between you and me were…” she gestured helplessly in the air. 

“But you’re still gonna do it,” he said. 

His disappointment was palpable. 

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m going over there as soon as I leave.” 

They fell silent again, and she briefly wondered if he’d started to fall asleep again, but this time she was looking at him and his eyes were still open. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

“I’m sorry,” he replied. 

None of their fights as a couple had ever ended this neatly. 

“I don’t have it in me.” 

She had no reason to justify her decision, but she felt compelled to say it anyway. She felt she owed it him to at least try to explain. 

She didn’t know what she expected, maybe another fight, another “you weren’t there, Mandy, what the hell would you know?” Another “look what happened to us and we’re not walking away.” 

Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t what she got. 

“Neither do I.” 

She studied his face. It was pained and exhausted. Exactly the way the face of a man who was shot less than seventy two hours ago was supposed to look. Not the way his face was supposed to look at all. 

“Yes you do.”

She was surprised at how urgent she sounded. 

“I can’t do anything.” 

“You mean work?” 

“I mean anything, but work’s a good point. They’re not letting me go back until after the midterms.” 

He sounded bitter. He sounded defeated. She wasn’t good at being nice and she didn’t generally do pep talks, but she could try. 

“I’m gonna be here for the next three weeks if I’m lucky.”

“And then you’ll be released,” she began. 

“To my home, where I will remain for the next eight to ten weeks, mostly on ‘modified bedrest,’ whatever that means.” 

“During which time I'm sure you can counsel the President over the phone, and then you’ll go back to work,” she said impatiently. She thought he needed the impatience. 

“I have strict rules on how much work I’m allowed to do from home while on leave. And then everyone will see me as a walking corpse. Or a guy to feel sorry for.” 

“For the first few weeks, yes, but then it will die down. They’ll have other things to worry about, like the results of the midterm elections. And eventually someone’s going to say they need your advice on something and you’ll ask why that wasn’t done weeks ago and they’ll tell you they couldn’t do it without you and they couldn’t talk to you because of the stupid rules, and then everything will go back to normal.” 

Josh smiled. 

“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

Mandy smirked nicely.

“I’m usually right.”

Josh attempted a small laugh, which quickly turned into a coughing fit. 

“You know, I’m actually going to miss you,” he said when he regained control of his breathing. 

“We’ll stay in touch,” Mandy said, but his face said he knew they wouldn’t. 

“Goodbye, Madeline,” Josh said. “I wish you well.” 

“You too, Joshua,” she said softly. He kept up a friendly smile until he thought she was gone, but she glanced back just long enough to see it drop, the pain and exhaustion of the last few days overtaking his expression. Mandy forced herself to look away. She didn’t have time to linger. 

For the last time, she had to get to the White House.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are always appreciated but never required. If you want to talk Mandy or try to figure out where this fic came from, hit me up or on tumblr @thebreakfastgenie.


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